jinian

At conference all day. Filled with hate despite cool science. (Well, awkward situation with PI is awkward, but.)

Found international market at Kanayama Station on the way home! Overpriced as fuck, but had Indian and Thai and American food OMG. Once I go to a market with more than three veggies in it, there will be green curry.

Currently eating the HELL out of a can of Hormel chili with cheddar tortilla chips while HIDING IN MY ROOM.

Well, I feel like I failed right now. I was just on a panel about self-objectification and geek girls, which I am competent to talk about in a cultural way. Unfortunately it was taken in a direction that was All About Cosplay At Cons, which I am not so knowledgeable about, and apparently I am the only one who thinks LESS objectification OVERALL would be better than ONLY having people who aren't thin-white-pretty-abled-etc. claim their ability to feel sexy by wearing revealing stuff in public. I think that can be great! I also think it can be problematic, for cultural reasons that the panel's source material addresses but our discussion kept veering away from.

And maybe I should be sorry, but I'm not: I do think individuals have a responsibility for the messages they're sending to others in public, regardless of how they personally feel about the outfit. (See "In Defense of Slave Leia" -- which I like a lot, I just disagree with the conclusion. Not every woman gets empowered.) The personal is political. I didn't expect to be alone in saying that at Wiscon.

So (1) the panel went wrong for me to begin with; the mod kept asking questions based solely in cosplay and cons, so we never really got to my material. (While I am annoyed with the result, it was a legitimate interpretation of the panel; I just wish we'd talked in advance so we could have modulated based on everyone's input.)
(2) We were missing a panelist due to injury. We got a substitute toward the end, and I really wish she'd been there all along! Up until then we had nobody who cosplays regularly, nobody familiar with the community, which it sounds like can be really great and supportive.
(3) I undoubtedly came off more extreme than I felt because it seemed like no one was hearing the cultural stuff I was trying to convey. THERE ARE CULTURAL FORCES, PEOPLE. Sometimes you want to dress up sexy because you're told to want that. No one is immune! Kids and babies are incredibly adept at picking up language and cultural cues, and social animals like us have evolved to be excellent at conforming because conformers don't get killed by their social groups. What I actually think is: when we know what our environmental factors are, we (yay humans!) can consciously choose to conform or not, and there are powerful choices to be made on both sides.

I wanted to talk about the Science Cheerleaders, man. And fucking Team Unicorn. Clearly cosplay is a huge topic that everyone wants to discuss, though. We didn't get to a quarter of the audience questions. Maybe I'll attend that panel next year (to hear what a jerk I was?). Hopefully I can be on one eventually that talks about the broader geek culture in a way that's more interesting to me.

I am all grouchy today, so I give you something highly absurd.



This is from a game in which my female character grew a full beard in her jail cell, so clearly the developer's understanding of sexual dimorphism is limited, but: breasts are made of flesh.

Today I once again had the annoying problem where graphs from Excel 2011 cannot be pasted into Illustrator CS4 without turning all text into strings of non-letter symbols. My wish to wallow in the misery of others like myself led me to discover, deep in a comment thread on the Adobe site, the fact that the problem is actually Microsoft's default fonts. If you change the font to something reasonable, like Helvetica, the problem is solved. WTF.

Anyway, it's a pain to change all the fonts manually on each graph produced, so one would think that changing the default font in Excel Preferences would help. No! Only the spreadsheet cells use that format. The graphs pay it no mind.

Apparently what you have to do is make a new "theme" (I called mine HELVETICA DAMMIT) and manually select it in each file. And I thought I hated Office 2011 before.

From mail to marzipan_pig:

I have just gotten A RESULT from MY SOFTWARE and it took for freakin' ever and I would have loved to have it WEEKS AGO but it is GOOD.

Off to Japan tomorrow! I spent largish amounts of money yesterday on presents for my hosts (Theo Chocolate), presentation outfit (Calvin Klein dress on the comparative cheap), and a sufficiently femme laptop bag (ratty backpack will not do). New haircut from Monday was way cute until washing and now will take getting used to again, alas.

Because (1) House republicans are ten years old: "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" is really your idea of an appropriate name for an official government action?

And (2) Rick Santorum is an evil, disgusting man. (Not a surprise at all, sadly, though his sheer brazenness is.)

Just woke up. Low fever. Argh. I really thought I might escape the current round of illness at the lab.

At least I have the replacement PS3? (The old one was dead, and that part of the DVD is dead too. I suspect malevolent spirits, because what?) Eternal Sonata seems dumb enough to play while sick, and now that I've switched the voice-acting to Japanese it's much less absurd.

The new Quicktime Player doesn't have Open Image Sequence, which I bought Quicktime Pro for and use in my research. QT X (ooh, it has an X) can do video capture and trimming, so I could put my blathering head on Youtube if I wanted, but actually I want to use the functionality I paid for. The solution? Turns out Quicktime 7 Pro got moved to the Utilities folder. WTF, Apple.

Frustrating well-enough-to-be-bored day. Feeling less awful, but still sore about the belly and very tired. The usual headache from lying around reading all day has shown up but was susceptible to painkillers at least.

I got up early (not that much hardship, since I'd been waking every two hours all night) and tried to get an appointment with the gyno ASAP, as requested, but the soonest available was next Wednesday. It wasn't clear to me whether my GP was going to move heaven and earth to change that, so I had to hop up and answer the phone every time it rang all day; none of the calls was from him, though. Also still trying to work out whether I am teaching or what next quarter, which has been a total clusterfuck, so had to hang about online in case the sane person involved wanted to meet this afternoon; also no contact on that front. So basically I waited all day for nothing. Gave up at four and took a four-hour nap.

I'll probably be well enough to go back to school tomorrow, though I don't expect to put in a full day. Wim should be back from his trip any time now, too. Back to normal until next time I have some awful episode without warning, then, I suppose.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard so I could use free microarray analysis software was totally worth the $30, but it was NOT worth having my well-behaved TextEdit suddenly THINK IT IS SMART and start REPLACING SHIT AUTOMATICALLY. Goddamn it I fucking hate auto-replacement defaults, especially ones that are NOT ASCII.

(Also why is my computer now clicking all wrong? It's acting like other people's computers, where you point at stuff and that is considered intent, so I think it's not just broken, but I can't turn it OFF.)